Enjoy the author's strong eye for details of time and place; skim the muddled pirate action on the high seas.
Issues of identity loom large in this tale of a female pirate whose journal becomes the research subject of a professor and her ambitious student.
Hannah Masury’s “Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates” tells a classic story: In 1726, the illiterate teenager witnesses the murder of a young sailor by pirates and knows she must flee Boston. Disguising herself as a boy named Will, she becomes cabin boy on a ship, only to find herself in the company of marauding pirates on their way to a tropical island where treasure is buried; to survive, she becomes a pirate, too. The journal’s existence proves that Hannah did survive, but is it, along with the treasure it describes, real? That’s the question Radcliffe Professor Marian Beresford tries to resolve two centuries later. Against her better judgment, and despite factual errors in Hannah’s version of history, Marian wants to believe that the journal her student Kay Lonergan has discovered is authentic. Marian finds backing for an expedition to search a crescent of islands Hannah mentions, but nothing works out as planned. Sometimes deadly earnest, sometimes sharply funny, the novel explores how women thwarted by circumstances shape-shift to fit in. Hannah, a starving girl in 18th-century Boston, finds some measure of security as a boy pirate, while Marian, a closeted 20th-century gay woman, lives with strict propriety as a spinster in Boston and occasionally escapes to the Mad Hatter, an actual gay club in 1930s New York. And obfuscating gender or sexuality is not the only tool of self-protection or -advancement the novel shows; Kay, described by Marian as "the heroine of her own imagination,” courts fame in the tabloid press with a canny mix of fact and exaggeration. In Howe's deliberately ambiguous narrative, authenticity is difficult to prove and not a clear absolute, in people or objects.
Enjoy the author's strong eye for details of time and place; skim the muddled pirate action on the high seas.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9781250304889
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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